stoffe

Someone bringing a suggestion up and nobody speaking out against it within a reasonable time given to respond, I'd guess. Don't think there are any formal processes for appointing staff, at least not that I'm aware of. Should give people a week to voice their opinion, if they so choose. I've received PMs from a few more people regarding this. I've not replied since I don't have anything meaningful to say yet, but I've read them.

While it's not up to me to decide, it might be handy for the powers that be (if there still be any) if you would do a design mockup, outline sketch or conceptual demo of how you would envision a new more modern design and layout for lucasforums. Just a thought. At least I'd be curious to see.

It has been received and brought up in the staff forum. Just remains to see if there are enough people still around to discuss it and have an opinion. Might take a little while. Generally speaking, if there are people with time and motivation to do something and skills within something like server system administration (linux, bsd), html/css/js web design, vBulletin template creation, PHP programming/MySQL databases or willingness to run and maintain game fansites, I'm sure you would be appreciated and hopefully not go ignored.

Indeed, if you want to get the most out of the game storywise you should increase your Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma as early as possible. (I'd go with 18 INT and WIS and the rest in Charisma at character creation). The mental stats of the Nameless One are very significant for what options are available in dialogue throughout the game, and high Wisdom boosts your XP gain a lot, making you level up faster (XP bonus is not retroactive so you want high WIS early). Once your mental stats are in a good spot you can put more into Constitution which will increase your health pool and make you regen health faster. You can also use tattoos from Fell's parlor to boost stats as needed, once you can afford them. While this does make you physically weak early on you can get other party members who are good at fighting to do the heavy lifting in combat for you. There is no mandatory combat in the Mortuary aside from killing one zombie for a key in the first room, if you choose your words and actions carefully. Seek out Mebbeth in Ragpickers Square as soon as you get out of the Mortuary, she can train you to become a Mage. Spell buffs can make up for your physical weakness somewhat. Also getting disabling AoE spells makes taking on groups of enemies much easier early on. Pacify at lvl 1 (puts enemies to sleep) and Horror at lvl 2 (makes them run around like headless chickens) are both good ones that can keep entire groups of foes from fighting back while your frontliners hack them to pieces. Also pick up Dakkon at the Smoldering Corpse bar ASAP, between him and Morte you should be able to manage most fights without much trouble. When you have 18 INT and 19 WIS you can talk to him about the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon. With those stats you will be able to unlock and comprehend all 8 circles, which will boost Dakkon's physical stats significantly (and give you some free spells).

Baldurs Gate II (Shadows of Amn+Throne of Bhaal) is a more traditional RPG in the sense that there is lots of fighting and a good bit of dialogue. It's a fairly standard D&D fantasy RPG set in the Forgotten Realms. It is still to date the longest game I've ever played, clocking roughly 200 hours for a "completionist" playthrough exporing everything and doing all the side quests. If you're looking for conventional sword&sorcery medieval fantasy epic with elves and dwarves, taking your character from humble beginnings to epic levels (and potentially beyond), this would be the #1 choice. Planescape:Torment is more of an interactive novel than an RPG in essence. It is extremely dialogue focused and while it has combat it takes the back seat and is fairly lackluster compared to the fighting in BG2. The dialog and writing is great though, and many dialog choices have consequences, great or small. The Planescape setting can take a while getting used to and is rather weird compared to standard high fantasy, but it fits the mood and theme of the plot very well. I'm currently replaying PS:Torment and it's still as good as I remembered it. If you want to try it Torment is available on Good Old Games (http://www.gog.com). GOG also has a link to a number of essential mods that make the game work on modern computers, allowing widescreen resolution and interface adjustments to accomodate it, along with various bug fixes (standard PS:Torment is locked to 640x480 screen resolution which looks horrible on modern monitors, and if you don't play it fullscreen the cinematics won't work) so be sure to get those as well. They're all easy to use, coming with installers. The game runs very well for me in 1920x1080 under Windows 7 64 with the modded GOG version. If you do play Torment, a simple piece of advice that will make the game much more enjoyable, to avoid a mistake many people seem to do when playing the game the first time: Don't approach the character building as your typical combat-focused RPG. Due to the extremely heavy emphasis on dialog you should focus on the "brainy" stats (WIS/INT/CHA) primarily, rather than the brawny ones (STR/DEX/CON). Wisdom boosts your experience gain from everything you do, Intelligence allows you to recover more memories throughout the game, and all three unlock additional dialog options, paths and solutions to quests and interactions. It also allows you to improve some of your party members, and affects what endings are available to you. Toward the end of the game you'll want those stats to be at superhuman levels (optimally 24+ CHA and 22+ INT/WIS). I'd put 18 INT, 18 WIS and the rest into CHA at the start of the game. You get 1 more attribute point to assign any time you level up, and you can get boosts to various attributes via dialogue and some artifacts throughout the game as well. Your character may be physically weaker early on this way, but you'll soon be able to pick up party members to compensate, and if you train to be a Mage as soon as you have to opportunity your high INT will be an asset in battle as well. If you don't do this and play as a strong dumb fighter you'll miss out on substantial chunks of the game. * * * If you're looking for some Infinity Engine nostalgia I'd pick up both those games, they are radically different in both play style and story and are both very good games. If you have to pick just one, I'd go with Torment just for the novelty of it. I haven't come across any other game quite like it yet. Unless you don't enjoy reading lots and lots of dialogue text, then Torment isn't for you.

It was just some trouble with the provider hosting the lucasforums server, no server crashes or such this time. It has been resolved.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I currently don't really have any games that I'm looking forward to and can't wait to play. Maybe the final Starcraft II expansion since I'm curious to see where the campaign storyline goes, but that's hardly preorder material either. All the big franchises and series I've followed have either ended of fizzled out into mediocrity. Mostly trying "new" games I'm being recommended and hoping for a pleasant surprise.

We're currently experiencing some technical difficulties with the host of the starwarsknights.com site which those tools are located on. The service provider is working on resolving it but for some reason it seems to be taking an awfully long time. But they should hopefully be available again within a few days.

Sid Meier's Mass Effect 4? If it's going to be set in the mass effect universe people are familiar with it'll have to take place just before the Reaper storyline started, since there isn't much left afterward in most endings, and they'd have to make one ending canon (since the fate of the whole galaxy differs significantly enough between endings) which would piss off even more people. Still if they do Wrex could probably show up as well since Krogan seems to have as long lifespans as asari do (unless they get killed first). Unless it's a zombie apocalypse game and you play as a reanimated undead Shepard.

Personally I liked Ðragon Age II well enough. It was different from Origins, but still fun. Some of it was worse than the predecessor, other things were better. While most games do this to some extent, in Ðragon Age II it done so overtly it was glaring. A better mix of new and recycled, and more effort taken to conceal reuse of areas, would indeed be nice. I'm a bit mixed on this. The ability for your character to build a distinct personality, which was then reflected in dialogs, cutscenes and even ambient oneliners, was a very nice touch (joker-Hawke is still my favorite). Having spoken lines for the protagonist, instead of just a nodding mute, was also a large improvement. Though the dialog wheel did suffer from some of the same vagueness as it does in the Mass Effect games. It's not always obvious what your character will say or do when a particular option is picked. This could've been solved as easily as displaying what will be said in a popup tooltip if you hover the mouse over a response option. Given the plot of Ðragon Age II it is understandable why they did it. It's hard to tell a character-centric story if the protagonist could come from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. So while it does annoy me slightly (like the fixed nature of the Nameless One i PS:Torment did), I understood why they did it, and it was not enough to ruin the game for me. Variable character size makes for a major headache when doing animations that's supposed to interact with another character or object. In Skyrim they solved it by resizing characters to the default size whenever they interacted with something, but that ended up looking silly too when an Altmer suddenly shrunk as soon as they sat down on a chair or leaned against a wall I suppose the only real options here with the current technology is to either use the same character size for everyone (ÐA2), resize on the fly (Skyrim) or not use character animations that interact with other characters or game world objects (Guild Wars 2), or make a number of fixed body sizes and then make animation combos for all the different body sizes interacting with each other and game objects, which would increase the amount of animation required exponentially, which isn't really worth the time and effort. It's a Bioware game, most of their games have a strictly linear main plot, and while you may be able to say different things, and in some cases choose between quests, you always end up in the same place. Makes for good storytelling, though at the cost of player participation.

I'm mostly using appearance-enhancing mods and new clothing/armor mods, as well as the PC Exclusive Animation Path and a ton of animation mods that makes my character move differently from everyone else. A few mods other than those already mentioned I can recommend: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/17605 http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12092 Dragon Bone Weapons Complete (it's not on Nexus any more, just the Steam workshop) http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1002 http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9717 Don't tell the court mage in Solitude that, since she by all accounts is a vampire (try the Detect Dead spell near her). If you want to kill vampires the Dawnguard DLC can still be worthwhile if you join the Dawnguard, since they're vampire hunter fanatics who's got plenty of work for you to deal with bloodsuckers. (Even though you'll be forced to work with a vampire, and even briefly become one, during the Dawnguard plotline.) If you do get it, pick up the Better Vampires mod linked above and use it to reverse the vampiric condition so it makes more sense (i.e. being strongest when you're newly fed). Well, there is that. But then you'd need to stock up on a lifetime supply of eclipse arrows for Auriel's Bow first, since Vamp-Serana is the only one who can make them.